Abstract:

This document is an excerpt from the current hypertext version of
an article that appeared in Walter Gautschi (ed.),
Mathematics of Computation 1943--1993: A Half-Century of
Computational Mathematics, Proceedings of Symposia in
Applied Mathematics 48, American Mathematical Society,
Providence, RI 02940, 1994.
The symposium was held at the University of British Columbia
August 9--13, 1993, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of
the journal Mathematics of Computation.

The original abstract follows.

Higher transcendental functions continue to play varied and
important roles in investigations by engineers, mathematicians,
scientists and statisticians.
The purpose of this paper is to assist in locating useful approximations
and software for the numerical generation of these functions, and to
offer some suggestions for future developments in this field.